Hostile reactions to Darwinism
At the end of the 19th century, Darwin's opponents were many within European and North American Christianity. On the Roman Catholic side, as from 1860, his opponents count a number of German bishops, diversely affiliated intellectuals spearheaded by the Jesuits among whom a Father de Scorraille would refer to Darwinian theories as “repugnant fictions”. In 1870, the first Vatican council[1] forbade any doctrine potentially contradicting the faith: “« the Church is far from hindering the development of human arts and studies [.... employing,] each within its own area, its own proper principles and method: but [...] she takes particular care that they do not become infected with errors by conflicting with divine teaching »
”. (Session 3, Chap 4 11-12 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils ed. Norman Tanner. S.J.) Pope Pius IX[2] and his successor Leo XIII[3] condemned among other things what they called “transformism”. Not that this would stop a few Catholic theologians from risking a defence of Darwin: “« The evolutionist theory will go the way of Galileo[4]'s »
”, wrote Dominican Dalmace Leroy[5], meaning that it would be accepted in the end (L'évolution des espèces organiques, 1887; quoted by Jacques Arnould in God Vs Darwin).
On the Protestant side, theologians on both sides of the Atlantic split between liberal and conservative. The former, in the wake of James McCosh[6] (active in Scotland then in the United States in the third quarter of the 19th century) held for the idea that the Bible is not a natural sciences text book, adding besides that the idea of a progressive creation (the evolution of species) in no way precludes the belief in the existence of God. Influenced by revivalism[7], the latter conversely saw in Darwin's theses a threat to Biblical inerrancy[8] and thereby to its revealed nature. In their view, this threat struck at the very doctrine of salvation (Creation of Adam and Eve, Fall, Redemption in Christ, Final Judgement).
US Evangelical Protestants[9] were to prove the most virulent opposition to Darwin. As early as the end of the 19th century, but mostly after the First World War, the word Fundamentalism[10] would refer to the promotion of a literal interpretation of the Bible given as free of error. Accordingly, the Protestant movement it spawned would stand against liberal theology, the historical critical reading[11] of the Bible and more specifically the theory of the evolution of species. For the Evangelicals, the important thing is not that Darwin is wrong, which they don't doubt, but that he is dangerous. The idea that humans were to seek their ancestry in inferior beings is not so much to be found in Of the Origin of Species (in which Darwin did not focus on the human species) than in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1871); now this idea, notably in its well-worn caricature of “man descended from apes”, undermines, in the eyes of Darwin's detractors the doctrine of humans created in the image of God and excludes the possibility of considering the latter creature, humanity, as endowed with a particular dignity. As a result Darwin came over as the enemy of the Bible, denying God Himself. Aligned among Darwin's religious foes stood such figures as L.T. Townsend[12] (Collapse of Evolution, 1904) and notably George McCready Price[13], Seventh Day Adventist[14] and author of a school textbook broadly distributed in the United States (The New Geology, 1923). The so-called antievolutionist stance upheld by evangelical circles gradually gained political currency enabling it to weight in on educational law-making in some Southern States, namely those that form, from Texas to Virginia, the Bible Belt[15].
The “Monkey Trial” episode
The conflict found a range of expressions in the early decades of last century. Fiery preachers – one of whom reporting how he flung at the floor of a museum a book entitled Prehistoric Animals on the grounds that nothing prehistorical could conceivably be Christian, articles in the papers, political debates in some states, a trial...
This much-publicized trial was held precisely in 1925 in a small Tennessee town, Dayton (under 2000 inhabitants at the time), right at the heart of the Bible Belt. Even though this trial did not have historically the influence it has sometimes been credited with, it is a testament to the virulence of the debate. In 1925, the State of Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” (Butler Act). Spurred on by an organisation for the freedom of speech, the American Civil Liberties Union[16], , a Methodist modernist and a handful of local libertarians readily found a young teacher, Tom Scopes[17] who had flaunted this law by the mere expedient of teaching by the state-approved textbook. Scopes agreed to being indicted on the basis of reports from students he had coached for the purpose. The trial would confront big guns from both camps, which secured a national audience far beyond Tennessee: press agencies arrived in town (a new telegraph line was brought in for the purpose) and the country's leading papers had their readers on the edge of their seats. In town, the public had arrived in their droves to follow the trial and the sale of monkey soft toys souvenirs thrived. The prosecution was lead by the well-regarded William Jennings Bryan[18], a retired lawyer with an impressive political record, and who set much store by his Bible to trump Darwin's theory. Facing him, the accused was defended by famed Chicago barrister Clarence Darrow[19]. Darrow who had come to public notice some years before in a spat against Bryan whose narrow-mindedness he had mocked thus impersonated everything the Evangelical South loathed most.
The trial is well known through a number of publications, notably one book published that very year in New York (Leslie H. Allen, Bryan and Darrow at Dayton), which reported its theatrical exchanges. The high point of the trial was undoubtedly the moment when Darrow, in an unprecedented move called Bryan himself as a witness for the defence... in his quality as Bible expert. By questioning him closely, he sought to show that if, as Bryan himself admitted the days in Genesis could last million of years, the story of creation, (which for instance give Adam and Eve for our first ancestors) should not be taken literally. Read that way, the Genesis account even includes absurdities “no intelligent Christian on earth” would credit. The trial, punctuated by endless procedural quibbling, closed on Scopes' condemnation with a fine of $100. Bryan, confounded in court, may have, just days later, died from the humiliation but this does not alter the fact that from a purely formal point of view, the “Monkey Trial” was a defeat for the evolutionists. The Butler Act would remain in force until 1968.
